This is a programme about abstract art.
It's a subject that can be as heavy or as light as you like.
For me, it's just natural because I'm always doing it
so I'm thinking about it all the time.
But I also think about basic questions that many people have:
How do we respond to abstract art?
Is it supposed to be hard or easy?
Is it about something or does it exist entirely on its own?
You see, abstract artists chucking paint around, why be so vague?
But then when they're precise, how does that help?
These could seem unanswerable questions, but abstract art
has been around for 100 years now, and is an ongoing thing.
By exploring the private world of living abstract artists,
and looking at some key figures from abstract art's history,
I'm going to show you that in fact there are answers.
Amid complicated and potentially confusing works,
there are hidden rules you might not expect.
Hey.
Hello, Matthew, lovely to see you. Lovely to see you.
No gap?
No gap, I'm going to get you to take some of it off. Oh, OK.
I work every day in a studio, paint abstract paintings
based on patterns together with my painting partner, Emma Biggs.
You know how sometimes you get scrapes into it? Yes.
Can you get some scrapes into it? Yes, that kind of scrape.
Yes. Like that? OK.
But Emma's really the generator of the colours - she thinks them up,
she physically mixes them, she mixes up the paint and she places them.
I'm the applier.
It's a kind of double act which, most of the time, the main emphasis
is on what comes out of Emma's head.
Yeah, that's better. Yeah? Yeah.
The history of abstract art is really
a history of experiment, so a lot of things come up in experimentation.
You've got colour theory art.
People do very honourable and serious types of art
based on scientific ideas of what makes colours zing together.
Then you've got abstract art which is all about accident,
but all of them are trying to find some kind of visual metaphor
which will be rich enough for what one might call reality.
Art is partly ideas and theories
but it's really only anything at all because of how it looks.
Looking is something you have to get used to.
Here are some abstract squares.
The kind of thing people often glance at
and then turn away from baffled.
The one on the left is by Mondrian, a famous figure,
and the one on the right is by Liubov Popova who's less well
known - we'll be meeting both those artists later.
Each painting has shapes that echo the basic shape of the thing
they appear on, the square shape of the canvas.
In hers you're seeing squares stretched out, fragmented, morphed
into triangles, tilted so they seem flying or full of movement.
In his abstract squares the colour is stark, based on contrast.
With hers the colour is continuous and sympathetic.
The grey and the pink are a softer version of the harder
black-red-white relationships. The grey and pink take the eye
back gradually, making space throughout seem three-dimensional.
So opening up to abstract values is an adventure
and you start by being willing to look.
The dynamism of the way in which shapes are placed prevents
you from reading that white as if it were a hole that can seen through.
It reads clearly as 'over' the other colours.
That's not easy to pull off,
it depends on the minor displacement of the angles everywhere.
Pink follows red and grey has a blue-green character that
also complements the red.
It's the colour in Popova's painting that contributes more than anything
else to the difference between her squares and Mondrian's squares.
If abstracts have got something to do with reality
but the artists aren't going to picture reality - why not?
And what reality are we talking about?
Art had been expected to picture reality according to approaches
and styles that were acceptable to most people -
a lovely landscape by Rubens.
But then, in the 19th century, new ideas about reality meant
Cezanne could picture reality as patterned shapes.
In the early 20th century the Cubist painter Braque
responded to Cezanne by picturing reality as a flattened space.
A few years later abstract art responded to Cubism with shapes
and spaces only.
People's sense of what was real was up for grabs
because everyday existence was full of rapid change caused my science.
Artists saw spirituality as both a challenge to the
power of science and a way of harnessing it.
This counterintuitive idea came from the spiritual movement of
Theosophy, which was founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky.
Blavatsky took aspects of eastern religion
and aspects of science, mostly evolution, and came up with
a spiritual movement based on evolution of the soul.
Abstract art started at the very peak of Theosophy's popularity.
People thought spirituality was like X rays or infrared radiation
or electricity.
It could be revealed.
There were a lot of different artistic takes on the spiritual,
but the strangest was the earliest.
Hilma Af Klint who was born in 1862 and lived and worked in Sweden.
These are paintings by her from 1907.
For decades nobody knew about them, but recently they've emerged
and started to be exhibited all the over the world.
From totally invisible she's become the main
excitement about historic abstract art.
A woman doing abstraction, plus doing it so it's full of meaning.
What kind of meaning?
Abstract artists were into spirituality
but Af Klint thought of herself as being in touch with actual spirits.
She conducted seances in this room
and received messages from spirits who were called the High Masters.
She produced 23,000 pages of notes, working out what the
High Masters were telling her to paint.
It was all Theosophical meaning.
Theosophy says colours and shapes can symbolise the soul's journey.
The tip of a coloured pyramid is the soul arriving within
the golden circle of pure spirit.
And there's pure spirit, Theosophy claims,
when dark is balanced with light, masculine with feminine.
All Af Klint's painting are profoundly Theosophical.
The not-Theosophical thing about them is the general look.
This look doesn't come from spirits,
because, to risk controversy for a moment, there's no such
factual thing as a spirit - they are mental projections.
To have the ability to create such a mental projection without
suffering debilitating mental illness is a fantastic thing.
But when it comes to creating a work of art, a mental projection
alone isn't sufficient because art isn't made just from visions.
It's made from visual traditions, the other abstract artists,
rooted in the visual traditions of painting,
explained themselves only partly by spirituality.
With her it's everything. It was beamed down to her
by a High Master on the astral plane who commissioned paintings from her.
She knew what the reason was.
So that those down on the earthly plane,
if they've enlightened themselves enough, might benefit from them.
That could be you, so keep an open mind.
It was only recently, decades after her death in 1944, at 82,
that Af Klint became known.
Now her work is categorised as the first abstract art
but there's very little evidence she thought of it as art at all.
Rather than abstraction, a type of art that didn't exist in 1907,
she thought it was direct meaning.
To us it looks like abstract art
but it's really diagrams explaining theosophical ideas.
To see what else there is to abstraction
you have to look elsewhere.
The Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky,
is the lord of abstraction.
He said it was created from inner necessity
and it didn't need nature to picture. It contained
all of nature anyway, just in abstract art's shapes and colours.
He meant the artist's sensitivity, his feelings
and memories are full of nature's impressions.
They can be got down onto the canvas in a completely abstracted way.
This is a painting by Kandinsky from 1912.
Its title, Painting With Black Arch, encourages you to think about
only what you're actually seeing.
That black arch is unmistakable
but Kandinsky knows that seeing art is a kind of heightened
seeing - it's made loaded by you being very visually alert, and
by your thoughts and expectations being primed by some kind of theory.
The book of the Lord is called On The Spiritual In Art.
Kandinsky published it in 1911 and it was read throughout Europe.
It was the first moment of abstract art becoming widely known.
Like Hilma Af Klint, Kandinsky was inspired by Theosophy's
notion of a coming New Age of the Great Spiritual.
Kandinsky's artistic approach was different
to Hilma Af Klint's though.
She thought paintings were diagrams to be interpreted by study.
He thought the actual materials of painting - colour, shape,
line - could be manipulated to affect the soul.
His line moves across the paper, it's captured on film in the 1920s.
He's in his 60s and has been painting abstractly
since he was in his late 40s.
Making a mark, he doesn't know in advance what's going to happen,
because he's not copying anything, but his instinct for making is
guided by his experience of making, judging what works what doesn't.
That's a visual thing, not a spiritual thing.
He had to get the spiritual to connect to the visual.
Madame Blavatsky was not Kandinsky's only spiritual mentor.
This is a meditation centre built by one of Blavatsky's followers
Rudolf Steiner.
Kandinsky read Steiner's theories - he was drawn to Steiner's
proposal that we all inhabit not one but several bodies
and one of these, the astral body, is invisible.
He began attending Steiner's lectures in 1908.
By coincidence, this was the same year that Hilma Af Klint
first met Steiner.
Unknown to each other, these two pioneers of very different types
of abstract art, were each equally aware that Steiner's education
programme in Theosophy had the title "How To Know Higher Worlds."
Art could be higher than nature, Kandinsky concluded.
Theosophy was essential in the mix but he needed other elements too.
They were the primitive, the musical and the way colour works.
The surfaces of the place he painted in, in Bavaria,
were covered in simple art, done by unknown artists -
anything outside the Western mainstream, he called it primitive.
The primitive, he claimed, gets to the essence of the spiritual.
His insight about music and art is that music affects us profoundly
but it doesn't represent anything.
He said art could be like music.
His paintings before abstraction were glowing landscapes, composing
them gave him a clue - working with colour was like playing the piano.
He said colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers
and the soul is the piano with its many strings.
The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key and then
another key in order to make the soul vibrate.
He was struck by Impressionist paintings by Monet
that could be imagined not even to be pictures, he thought,
but just colours and by his own landscapes.
One day he saw a painting that had really good colour.
He didn't realise it was one of his own on its side.
Trivial accidents like not recognising your own painting
or not realising a picture is a picture were the jolts of absurdity
that Kandinsky needed in order to get his abstract experiment going.
So the theory in action,
the black arch in Painting With Black Arch is the means
by which the red shape dominates the blue shape, bearing down on it.
The black is the accent that animates everything.
Let's take a major rhythmic organisational idea, like music.
The painting goes diagonally there
and is countered by different a diagonal movement here.
One movement counters another.
The arch's blackness is continued elsewhere in other black lines,
variations on a theme,
pronounced or merged-in depending on their surrounding colour,
like musical chords depend for their mood on what chord comes next.
Well, the visuals of Painting With Black Arch have a logic
that can be explained in musical terms - repetition
and surprise, movement countermovement.
It's not just logic, it's sensual impact, and in my view it's great.
Where does the idea that abstract art is difficult come from -
from the viewer or the artist?
What would it mean if Fiona Rae said her abstracts were spiritual?
If Kandinsky's rule was to transcend nature, her rule is
the rule of surprise move.
At the moment, I'm experimenting with making a painting
just in black and white.
I usually use colour.
What's the reason to not use colour?
I don't know how quite to express that in a positive way
but I suddenly felt incredibly fed up with colour,
and I wanted to start again by clearing everything out
and go back to a very basic black and white beginning.
I've seen a really nice sort of loopy gesture
that I think I can put down here.
It really, the process... I know that it's quite strange being filmed
doing this but the process really is like this. It's like, "Shall I?"
"No, I won't. "Yeah." "No, I won't." "What about?" "No, actually."
And then suddenly you do something like that quite casually
without even thinking about it. So I'm just going to...
I also think it's important not to take the same size brush
or the same bit of colour
and repeat it all over a canvas like a sort of pattern or something.
So although a finished painting needs to have its own rhythm
and its own structural integrity, I like the idea of somehow
getting different bits of paint language to join up
and do that and not to do with little repetitions.
So you don't literally join up by doing the same thing? No.
There are differences, different zones of energy. Yeah.
Like kind of, I want the viewer to not be entirely sure
what the focus is or what the most important thing is.
That the whole thing overall is the experience.
I suppose that, in a way, maybe that's what makes me
an abstract painter.
In that I think that the marks all exist as themselves,
in themselves, and by themselves, as well as going together
to make some image you might read in one way or another.
Yeah, you're aware that there are component parts
but there is also an energy running through them all that unifies them.
Yes, and I'm also trying to make a picture of something
that doesn't exist, which is an impossibility of course, but...
..I'll just keep trying.
Maybe that's a good definition of abstraction?
I think so, yeah. Yeah, it is, it's an impossible task
but it's a very interesting one.
When colours are related together by abstract art,
it's not just colours artists like or they hope the public will like.
They're noticing something
that colour does - how it can be wrong or right, in or out of key.
How the colour of light in the real world filters out all
differences and creates a single visual register within which
all differences are unified.
In 1914, Sonia Delaunay, one of the great founders of abstract art,
created this colour painting.
It's called Electric Prisms.
Delaunay invented a whole new way of compressing
arrangement in art down to colour and form.
What are colour and form?
Form in art means arrangement or structure, but it also means
the individual elements that the structure is made up from.
Think of music. A piece of music is an arrangement, or a composition.
But it is made up of smaller musical events that are all related
together so there is a single unity, which is what composition is.
The composition is a form
and the individual musical events are forms too.
Colour isn't something that exists and light reveals it to us.
Colour IS light.
And Delaunay's abstract rule was to create light by scientific laws.
In the 1910s, abstract artists were awed by the power of science.
If it could cause people to get round the world at high speed, and
communicate with each other across vast distances, as well as explore
the depths of the unconscious as psychoanalysis was doing -
the modern science of the mind - maybe science could also radically
transform art, so art could be a cosmic vision of everything.
Throughout history, artists had played
with our perception of colour intuitively, but in the 19th century
science began codifying new laws about how we perceive colour.
Colours go from red to mauve to blue, through all the spectrum,
and round back again to red.
For a long time this had been visualised as a colour wheel.
But in 1855 the colour chemist, Eugene Chevreul, said colours
opposite each other on the wheel have the same intensity
and placing them side by side causes what he calls an optical vibration.
Delaunay absorbed that scientific rule and took it over to serve
her own rule of painterly evocation of the emotional lift of light.
Softened colour is subjected to a rigorous but wavering grid,
that circular layout.
The grid is the form she's using. She's unafraid of breaking it.
Colour overlaps the borders onto adjacent colours
following a colour need. Where there is a chance that the
relationship between the colours threatens to be the visual
equivalent of out of tune, she changes the colour logic.
Bringing light green over purple so primrose will sing out.
Or intensifying yellow red to darker red so it will connect to
a rhythmic pulse of dark and light accents everywhere.
Delaunay was married to another colourist, Robert Delaunay.
They were impressed that their friend Kandinsky liberated
colour from having to picture anything.
But the Delaunays had a very different approach to Kandinsky.
Think of them in Paris over there
and him working in Germany over there.
Colour in Kandinsky is emotion - emotion events.
They're interwoven to create a dynamic drama.
He doesn't use the full range of colours.
With Delaunay it's just a simple design - radiating bands.
But she uses a vast range of colour
and it's a real enquiry into what colour can do.
Every single element of the painting is about a fusing or
clarifying of form through subtle adjustments of colour
so that the overall form, or composition,
celebrates light as a sheer, overwhelming, spirit-lifting force.
The Delaunays got that radiating circles layout from the glow
of colour around the electric lights by night in Paris.
The old gaslights had only just been replaced by electricity.
Sonia Delaunay recorded in her memoirs at night on walks,
arm in arm, we enter the era of light.
The halos made the colours and shadows swirl and vibrate like
unidentified objects falling from the sky and beckoning our madness.
In 1912, when Kandinsky's On The Spiritual In Art was spreading
its message, Robert Delaunay wrote a manifesto called, simply, Light.
The manifesto had a climactic last sentence,
like the words of a colour prophet, "Let us attempt to see."
The rule John McLean obeys is the rule to keep
looking for the infinitesimal adjustments that will give
simple shapes a convincing subtlety, like light in the world.
Let's go on and get rid of that iridescence.
Oh, look, I really like the way that red's differentiating
itself from the rest. Yeah.
So they're very simple shapes but it's the treatment of them
as well as the placement of them that's important.
Yes. I do quite a lot of landscapes.
I don't feel any...
I feel a complete continuity between figuratively painting
and abstract painting.
I don't see any difference
and I realise perhaps I'm not really a purist.
Yes, you don't think it's about the purity of the abstract forms,
you think there's a continuity between abstraction and reality.
Absolutely. The visual world.
Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
It's interesting that already I'm feeling,
"No, maybe I was being too...
"..impetuous",
but it's a very beautiful passage
that now with the nacreous stuff coming through the very thin
glaze of red. Indeed.
And so maybe there's scope in this for something
with sheer beauty like the wing of a moth,
or something fleeting like that. Yeah.
In fact that could be the redeeming bit of the whole painting.
Maybe I've won it after all.
So the approach is partly to pick out the forms
and partly to allow the forms to seem to emerge from the ground.
Yeah, and make sure the atmospheric
and, I guess, just not atmospheric. Yeah
I'd be loathed to touch that right away, it may be finished now.
Yeah.
But I feel with my own work that the simpler I can make it,
in a strange way, the more profound I feel it is.
For the Swizz artist, Paul Klee, whose abstracts were often nothing
but squares, nevertheless the rule was always to observe nature.
In order to make something abstract seem true to the world around us
Klee uses tonally graded colour.
Tone is different to colour.
Colour is colour but tone is the alteration of colour's vivid
bright vibrating impact by making that colour lighter or darker.
Tone here is mostly dark,
but with a number of high spots where colour seems to sing out
like sunshine hitting a hill or light seen through the trees.
In 1914, when Klee was 35, he went on a trip to Tunisia.
The trip was to alter him
from being one kind of artist to a completely different kind.
And the big moment was an evening visit
to the Kairouan mosque in Tunis.
You never really see the mosque in the dozens
of watercolours that he produced following this visit.
And of course it isn't Islamic culture or Islamic decorative art
that interests Klee in this moment.
You see carefully controlled different degrees of
transparency and colour that tells you
about constantly shifting light.
You get the feeling not that he saw something that was different
to anything he'd ever seen, like a colour miracle,
but more that he came to the realisation that there was something
in him that he could work with
and that he hadn't attended to before and that he could now define.
The power of his visual experiments from that trip
is in one thing affecting another -
as if everything is perception
nothing is anything in itself.
Everything is perception.
The light on some glass or concrete,
the organisation of shapes in the city, the look of the Earth,
the shapes of clouds and their relationship to the horizon.
We organise this sensual input just as we organise our minds about
who we are and where we fit in the world and how society is made up.
Klee tried to do something about society.
He was part of the Bavarian uprising in 1919.
Within months this socialist revolution, inspired by events
in Russia, was crushed, the leaders murdered, and Klee's dreams
of a communist society sympathetic to his kind of art were ended.
For the next 20 years, until his death in 1940,
Klee divided his time painting and teaching - most influentially in
the Bauhaus, the school of art and design set up in Germany in 1919.
The first thing you have to do as a visual artist,
he would tell his students there, is pay attention to the infinite
subtlety of tonal shades in nature.
The Nazis had different ideas to Klee's about nature
and his art was publicly mocked, along with Kandinsky
and Mondrian, in the notorious 1937 exhibition called Degenerate Art.
They called Klee a Jew even though he actually
came from a Catholic family and they said he distorted reality.
We all hate the Nazis of course,
but did they have a point about distortion?
After all, what's the difference between Klee controlling colour
so there's a feeling of reality and him just distorting reality?
Well, I agree with Klee - I think there is no single correct
interpretation of what's out there.
We each organise what we perceive and create our own version of it.
Klee is trying to pick that process apart.
He's offering proposals about what perception is.
In our studio the rule is to think about what's really seen
when anyone sees anything.
We can only see any kind of form because of the way light reveals it.
It's through light and dark
that you sort of understand the shape of something.
So that's a fundamental aspect of seeing,
that we're abstracting in our works.
I mean, if you were to look at, for example, here. This area, which is
lighter or one side and brighter on the other, so that in a sense
you read as lighter, and those two areas you read as darker and that is
contrasted with lighter tones behind it and a darker tone behind that.
So it sort of gives some kind of a sense of the image occupying
space a bit like... As if it had some sculptural form I suppose.
Like a haystack in the field or a pyramid. Yeah.
So you've got light, dark and then you've got light, light, dark, dark.
Yes, exactly. And when that is adjacent to something which does
immediately the opposite. Where you have light here, you have
dark there. Where you have dark here, you have light there.
Where that happens, consistently across the whole canvas,
it gives you a kind of pulsing feel.
Yeah, so there is a rigid adherence to a system of light and dark.
Like there is in life.
Light and dark, light and dark, wherever you look.
The relationship between colour in abstract art
and what might loosely be called reality
doesn't always stay the same.
It depends how colour is used.
The next artist is the toughest as far as giving reality a break goes.
It's Mondrian, who follows a rule of always using very few colours.
Here's a painting by Mondrian in his famous style,
severely minimal lines and rectangles.
It's from 1922 and it's made up only of black lines and white,
or a sort of bluish off-white,
and a few strong primaries -
blue, yellow, red.
Even these few elements are reduced down even more
in that the whole of the surface, or almost
the entirety of the surface, is just that white, or off-white.
And the stronger colours are confined to accents
along the perimeters of the square - blue, yellow, red.
The centre is opened out, so there's nothing there but a square.
And that square seems to tell
you about nothing except the square of the outer edges of the painting.
In fact, every shape tells you about every other shape,
in that it is either a variation on it or repetition of it.
What else are you seeing in it? Nothing.
Except you could see more in what you're already seeing.
You're seeing shapes talking to shapes,
they're telling each other about themselves,
they're defining themselves by their slight differences.
He said the masculine is manifested vertically
the feminine, horizontally.
It's the mysticism of Theosophy.
Theosophy says in the future, all social imbalance will be
balanced out in a new societal shape.
Mondrian says his art visualises that new shape.
Here's Mondrian in his theosophical pose.
He actually mixed Theosophy with the philosophy of Hegel.
Hegel said the universe is governed by rules of tension
and contradiction.
In Mondrian's painterly version of Hegel's philosophical rule
that every element is determined by its contrary,
Mondrian offers a line, but also a gap.
There's a black bar that looks as though it will repeat to fill
that space, but it doesn't.
In the first case, you're forced to see that line.
Also the edge of the painting that the line stops short of.
You're forced to consider that edge.
And in the other case, you're forced to see that whole horizontal
empty rectangle he's started dividing
because he deliberately doesn't continue dividing it.
Mondrian influenced modern architecture,
but it had no interest for him.
He thought architects were hopeless materialists.
He envisaged a new-shape architecture environment
all over the world
that would be pure flat planes, lacking solidity of any kind.
I don't know how that would work and I suspect Mondrian didn't either.
He's tough on what he thinks of as deception, he wants to get to truth.
He's dealing all the time with ideas,
but the main one is visual order.
He provides a visual organisation so elegant and complex,
that it's capable of endless reinterpretation,
but you've got to recognise in the first place that it is visual.
And if the particular nature of that organisation -
pure abstraction -
accords with Mondrian's theosophical beliefs,
namely that everything we see around us is only an illusion -
maya is the Indian word for that illusion adopted by Theosophy as
Theosophy adopts terms from all religions -
so a purely abstract painting is more true to the real reality that
lies behind everything than a painting that attempts to
capture aspects of the illusion version of that higher reality.
That is a mind twist as well as a sentence twist.
Nevertheless, the painting is a visual work of art that
demands to be seen on its own visual terms.
Nature doesn't disappear in abstract art - nature's laws
are condensed into a visual form, that's the rule Tess Jaray follows.
Paintings that combine all sorts of processes including printing
instead of painting.
I have to clean that up pretty fast.
I see you're doing something that has to be quite precise,
but precision isn't the meaning of what you're doing.
Absolutely not, precision is only ever a tool.
It should look as though there is an ambiguity between what
is in front and what is behind.
You can't quite tell
and that is a way of engaging people with the object.
As you say, there is an ambiguity about the front and behind.
There's a sort of flicker between the two colours.
Exactly that, so you're not just being presented with something,
you are being asked to participate.
Yes, so in looking, you're kind of part of the process
of what's happening. Yes.
But you're doing small things here that one could almost pick up
and hold like an icon or timeless objects.
You're doing things that are very, very resolutely abstract
with only a couple of colours.
There's a certain type of surface, very much
a physical thing as well as an optical thing.
I think that is incredibly important.
I mean, in a way, this is how we see the world.
Everything is surface.
You know, when I talk to you, that's all I'm seeing.
Because I want the colour to be as intense as possible,
I get it screen printed with oil-based ink.
If I use paint, it's almost impossible to get a completely
smooth surface.
The more evidence you have on a surface of the way it's done,
the less you're going to understand or feel the intensity of the colour.
Right.
I mean, I would like to reduce everything down to its essentials.
In that way, it's kind of following nature.
So you're very, very concentrated visual events, in a way.
They're a concentrated, honed, condensed version
of reality of the world. Yes, exactly that.
Very simplified shapes. Yes, and I try to say it with as little added,
as little pretension as directly... I mean, this whole very
complicated system is really set up in order to produce something that
looks as though it's totally simple and it's just popped into the world.
Jesus inside geometric shapes. This is an icon in the Byzantine style
from the 15th century.
The Russian abstract artist, Malevich, respected this look.
Byzantine art stripped down the realistic style that existed
in Greek and Roman times. Art that shows in detail how reality looks.
So a higher reality can be contemplated,
Byzantine art ditched the detailed look in favour of simple signs.
And for the same reason, Malevich displayed his abstract
paintings as if they were icons in a Russian church. He's offering
a modern proposal about simple signs serving a higher reality.
The rule that form is feeling, Kandinsky stated it,
but Malevich took it to the furthest extreme.
When Malevich created his pure geometric abstract art style, which
he called Suprematism, in 1915, the First World War was under way.
There were food shortages, collapsing morale, there was
despair at brutality and death.
The following year, Malevich was a soldier in the army himself.
You're looking at squares again, what are these ones doing?
Two of them - one black, one red, one large, one small, one tilted,
suggesting movement.
Paint is capable of so much more than this,
so you know we're being told about extreme limitation.
Two squares surrounded by white.
There is a set of mathematical relationships there where
shapes and spaces are made to seem visually equivalent.
So the black shape is the same as the white space underneath it.
The white space to the right of the red shape is somewhat
the same as the red shape.
There is a sense throughout of - this is this, this is this,
this is the same as this.
Movement implied by something very, very small.
You'd think you couldn't get much more reduced than that.
But this painting was done very shortly after he created
a work called the Black Square.
The most famous abstract painting in history.
He redid the original several times
because its surface cracked.
This 1923 version is a delight of
velvety-rich, granulated brushy blackness.
The creation of something out of nothing, a painted something.
There's something absurd about it, as if with Suprematism there's
a rightness of shapes, but insanity about how he got to that rightness.
He said the logical consequence of no-one ever being able to put
back together all the fragmented bits of reality in Cubism, is that
art should take the next step and abandon logic, embrace its absence.
Malevich was offered a word for no-logic creativity
by the poets he knew, the word was "zaum".
The poets wrote manifestos for a changed
future in which the food shortages would be solved by transforming soil
into bread, horses would be free and there'd be equal rights for cows.
Where you might make out a table with a violin on it
in a Picasso Cubist painting,
a Malevich Cubist painting would have a violin with a cow on it.
His friends called themselves Futurists.
He put on an opera with them in 1913.
He provided sketches for costumes and sets
and two years later he elaborated this sketch into the black square.
He painted it in a kind of ecstasy,
he couldn't sleep or eat he was so jangled, it all seemed clear.
He wrote that the black square equals feeling,
the white field equals the void beyond feeling.
Supreme in the word Suprematism - the name that Malevich gave
to his geometric style - means supreme over reality.
He said that the objects that make up this world are not reality.
They might call forth feeling,
but feeling separated from reality is the only true reality.
He means the objects out there that we assume to make up
objective reality don't really.
In fact, it's only by abstracting objects that we can get to reality.
This has a long title but part of it is the term "fourth dimension".
It was fascinating to artists.
Time warped by space or the other way round.
Ordinary existence warps into higher existence in the fourth dimension.
That was the claim of the Russian Theosophist P.D. Ouspensky.
Malevich absorbed the Theosophical lesson like
so many abstract artist then and built it into his paintings,
abstraction soaring into the beyond.
He explained to his students, "we've come to the rejection of reason,
"but only because there's a new form of reason now."
Some of Malevich's students would become the new Russian
avant-garde that would make him seem old-fashioned.
They were called Constructivists.
One of them was Liubov Popova.
This is a design by her for the cover of a magazine from 1922.
The fact that it is abstraction turned to a functional use
tells you about the turn taken in the early '20s
by abstract art in Russia.
Clarity, powerful, look-at-ability,
but it's not about contemplating the ineffable.
It's about making a magazine attractive and looking at new
things, because it's a magazine of new kino, new cinema.
To appreciate that as a jump just as radical as abstraction being
invented in the first place,
you have to look once again at what abstraction is.
Abstraction strips everything down to form.
But form can be radically different from instants to instants.
Even though it looks like it's just more form.
This painting by Popova from 1917 was influenced by Malevich's
teaching. The difference between it
and her magazine cover from a few years later when she'd become
a Constructivist is that form isn't a feeling for the Constructivists.
Form is useful.
There'd been world war and civil war. Now there was extreme poverty,
violence, hunger, a breakdown of communication and transport.
And out of all that not just a new society had to be built,
but a type that had never existed before on Earth.
The Constructivists identified the factories as the centre
of production. Art should move there.
They even changed the name of art to production.
This is a Productivist sculpture by one of Popova's colleagues,
Vladimir Stenberg.
This form could be a prototype for what a socialist society
would actually look and feel and be like, as opposed to how such
a society had been theorised and dreamed of before the revolution.
Popova's shapes and spaces were for definite things.
These ones were for a banner for a revolutionary poets' club.
This was the cover of a catalogue for a Constructivist exhibition.
The controllers of the new revolutionary state were sceptical.
And eventually they did crush Constructivism and Productionism.
Well, "how are you really going to connect art to politics?",
Lenin said to the Constructivists when he visited them
in the new art schools his government set up
and paid for, when there was very little money for anything.
Popova taught Constructivists and she exhibited with them. They saw
no reason to drop abstract form just because no-one could understand it.
She died at 35 from scarlet fever after only a few months of success
in the factories with clothing designs based on geometric form.
And the whole
Constructivist/Productionist movement
was destroyed by Politburo decrees about form.
Abstraction relating to reality was out.
Reality had to be conveyed from now on by picturing instead.
By propaganda.
Constructivism failed,
abstract form would never again automatically mean Left politics.
It turns out when you make something,
you can't necessarily control its meaning.
Abstraction in Europe went quiet in the 1930s with
the rise of fascism in the West and totalitarian communism in Russia.
The end of the Second World War in 1945 saw
a revival of abstraction in lonely studios in New York.
Changing the world by cosmic visions, by spirituality,
or art giving a concrete form to socialism were not
the ideas context for abstraction any more.
Being an individual, being an outsider,
making those on the inside, the conformists,
see what freedom could be. These were the new ideas.
Many people think the rule of this artist is no rules at all.
In fact, you're seeing a rigidly architectural structure
achieved by nothing but free, loose flowing open marks.
It's an amazing balancing act, once you start to see it
and it shows that the standard criticism of Jackson Pollock,
that anyone could do it, is unfair.
Paint, very liquefied. Only black, no other colour,
thrown onto the canvas, and very briefly titled, Number 32.
The painting was done one day in 1950, with the canvas
rolled out on the wooden floorboards in his studio in New York,
in a rural part of the state a few hours' drive from the city.
Ten years before he'd been in therapy with a Jungian
analyst, trying to deal with the alcoholism that defined
Pollock's life as much as being an artist defined it.
He brought his drawings to the sessions.
Later their lines and spaces would be exploded
to become paintings on a vast architectural scale.
He said he was painting the aims of the age,
and he didn't need to paint nature because he was nature.
It looks pretty free.
There's something outrageously free about an artist throwing paint
and stepping on the painting.
But freedom is a meaning he wants to get across.
It comes from the climate of the times.
It's not the visual end result that his outlandish process
will actually create.
However he gets there,
he ends up with a tightly controlled rhythmic structure.
The canvas is regularly and rhythmically occupied.
Imagine the lighter lines without the heavier blobs.
Never mind how they're created, they contribute to the visual
complexity, it would be a very different effect.
The web of lines
and angles goes out to meet the outer edges of the painting,
pulling back, flowing out all round those edges, so what happens on the
perimeter is a controlled version of what's happening in the centre.
You read the meaning through what is impossible to miss -
the materials and how they're treated.
You're forced to see that the paint is paint, with its dried
lumpy bits and delicate stained bits, its range of textures,
reflective paint contrasted with paint that has been absorbed
by the canvas. Those textures are the things he's composing.
Their differences are what he makes a visual symphony out of.
An artist today in Deptford making something harmonious.
Paul Tonkin. Like Jackson Pollock, his rule is that harmony can
come from a surprisingly wild process.
This is just...what I do really. I just make these...
It's just a question of covering it with paint, basically!
But I like making these curvy shapes.
I suppose someone looking at it now might think, "Oh, landscape,
"hills, lakes." Is anything like that in your mind?
No, I'm just trying to get the stuff on there.
But, yeah, I can see what you mean! Of course.
It could look like the Loch Ness monster as well, couldn't it?
Except if something starts looking too much like something very
specific, then I might... Alter it? ..try and change it.
Yes, yes, yes.
Where shall I put the red?
How did you know where to put the blue and the yellow?
That's a good point, but now it's getting more complicated, you see.
But I'm treating it like a painting, which I do, you see, and it's not.
So we're looking at the creation of an under-painting
and this is part of a stage that you always go through.
It's the first stage, yeah.
And the under-painting has a certain life of its own
and a certain rhythm. Yes. But it isn't the painting as such.
Well, when it's dry I'll look at it
and cut it into rectangles of different sizes
and then pin them to the floor
and then work on top of them.
And will those different rectangles be a separate painting?
Yes.
It's got a fantastic energetic movement.
Yeah, well, that's the thing, that's what I want to get -
the movement and...
..but then I'm going to mess it up, you see.
That's the fun bit.
Oh, shit.
THEY LAUGH
I don't usually waste quite as much paint as that!
That was fantastic.
Yeah, but it wasn't kind of what I wanted.
And it looks great as well, but I'm going to move back.
You'd better move back, Matthew. Yeah.
You better get out of the way, man,
because I'm chucking the stuff around.
It's fantastic.
But it's like destroying and creating at the same time.
Yeah. It's amazing how beautiful those veils of colour can be.
Yeah, well, it is, but unfortunately
when it dries out, it doesn't stay like that.
It doesn't... It's not...
HE LAUGHS It's going...
It's going everywhere!
That's quite good, yeah.
Where do you think the precision is in what you do?
Well, it gets more precise.
I'd have to show you the later stages
to show that it gets very, very precise near the end.
It's to do with the drawing, I suppose.
And, to me, drawing is movement
and colour is the most important thing
and trying to get colours working together.
So that they actually combine to make something that, actually,
when you come into the studio,
and you've seen that painting, having had a night's sleep,
and you're coming in again to see it fresh the next morning,
it will actually make a statement back to you,
and then you feel actually this is now a painting.
It's actually telling me something.
The next artist is the other side of the same coin of freedom
that is controlled in some way.
With Dan Parfitt, I think his rule is to have totally controlled,
calculated stages that result in a look of flowing freedom.
I've got a plan, I like a plan.
The improvisation happens in the drawing.
The previous stages to the one we're looking at right now.
And that's a print out of one of your drawings?
Yeah, here is where it gets scaled up onto a large scale canvas.
So these little drawings are like scores.
The drawings that you work from.
Yeah, well, this little print out is like a score that I'm
performing, like if I were a musician performing.
So it gives me the structure,
but these marks have got to be made in real-time.
It doesn't really matter if there's a bit of...
splashing because we're just going for the...
..trying to make the mark as expressive as possible,
really get a sense of its speed,
its proper real-time quickness.
This is the fastest stage of the whole painting.
This is the fastest stage, maybe the funnest stage as well.
Because out of nothing comes something. Suddenly, there's
a whole bunch of black marks that begin to indicate something.
I mean, even though my work is very non-representational,
nevertheless it should be evocative.
I suggest a sort of natural world without at all depicting
anything in particular.
Well, yes, it does want to feel like part of our natural world.
But maybe an imagined correlation of it.
Somehow. How we pull it inside of ourselves and build little models.
So it's an introvert experience of an extrovert world.
Very good. So things come and go in this process?
They really do, yes.
To begin with there's what looks like an armour chair,
Once that's done,
there will never be anything else like that, it comes and goes.
No, it won't look like this and, in fact, much of this painting
I'm doing right now is redundant or will become redundant.
Much of it will be obscured.
OK, that's enough of that one.
So this has got to dry now?
This has got to dry, yeah, we can't have any drips
because a drip would indicate gravity. Yeah.
So really we want this to be floating.
Like all these things, I want them to feel like a bunch of stuff
thrown up in the air and then you've taken a photograph of it. I see.
As it just reaches its zenith.
In abstract art, since Jackson Pollock, there is often a sense
that meaning might be as simple as just the way paint is put on.
Paint can be applied any way, sometimes frankly and flatly,
as if the surface didn't mean anything or, which is what
these paintings by Mark Rothko are doing,
so a sort of breathing surface is the main theme, the main
effect by which the painting is able to convey its message.
Rothko was a New Yorker whose family immigrated from Russia
when he was a child.
Until middle-age he was unsuccessful and poor.
He sympathised with the revolutionary,
political movements in the USA in those times.
He lived an isolated existence. He was unstable and so
when success came in the 1950s, its suddenness was overwhelming.
The paintings we were just looking at were done by him
in the late '50s as a commission for the new Seagram building
for the exclusive restaurant on the top floor called the Four Seasons.
But having painted them, he became furious at the idea of
"rich bastards", as he called them, eating in front of his work.
Ten years later he gave the paintings away free to what
was then the Tate Gallery.
He was fanatic about how they should be displayed. The lighting
and spacing, even today, is exactly as Rothko wanted.
By grim coincidence, he died on the day they arrived in Britain.
Rothko committed suicide
and his paintings don't depict anything so it's only natural in
a way that we should wish that death might be what they're communicating.
I don't personally think that.
That's a human tragedy, but the meaning
of the paintings is different to that profound visual lift.
That's the same meaning that a cathedral has,
or the inside of an Egyptian tomb, or a Greek temple.
Death is part of those things as well,
but in such a universal sense that it's as if the marvel
of the whole of existence, not just its termination point,
is being celebrated.
Death as part of some kind of gigantic cosmic unity.
Rather than getting carried away with what's become over the years a
sort of rhetoric of heavy-breathing emotion, let's try instead
to understand what these paintings actually are and how they work.
That sense of a surface that is active
and expressive gets more and more insistent as you look.
The grey is applied lightly like a mist, diffused,
so the surface becomes cloudy not sheer, animated not still or inert.
The painting as a whole is created in terms of misty breakups
and stuttering breakups,
and then passages that are all about merging and flowing.
So if the feeling is, "Well, it's all dark" or "It's all red",
the experience of darkness and redness is a nuanced one.
A simple colour theme of blackish red is elaborated
and celebrated so that the whole of existence is celebrated.
The room is a sort of Pharaoh's tomb.
In his control-freakery he's a megalomaniac like the pharaohs.
He's the pharaoh and the pharaoh decorator in a Rothko
centric-universe. He's the architect, the painter,
and the philosopher priest.
All that pretentiousness would be off-putting
if it weren't for the rule of painterly
transformation that is the true interest of this abstract art.
The quality of surprise in the treatment of a surface
so that looming darkness is alive with energy.
The rule that colours placed next to each other will always
suggest depth, different positions in space,
was exciting to artists like Paul Klee and Mark Rothko,
and has been followed by Albert Irvin, who's now 92, for 50 years.
Put it down in front of those tins.
Yeah, that's it.
And drop it onto its back, too.
OK, and put those under.
Oh, God, it's nice to have somebody helping.
I'd better come and be your assistant. It's a real luxury.
They're abstract paintings
but they are informed by my movement through the world.
Those marks seem sort of structural and they have their own life...
Yes. ..as events.
Structural in terms of the whole unity
and they have their own personality.
Yes, I'd like to think so.
You know, in so far as painting is a language, I think the brush
marks are the verbs.
Although you can probably analyse that out of extinction
if you wanted to.
No, I think painting as a language is a good idea,
and the brush marks as verbs is a good idea.
There are things behind things, you know?
Like in the space of this studio now,
if I look across the room,
you're standing in front
of the wall, so it's those sorts of perceptions.
I understand completely what you are saying
but it's as if reality itself is layered. Yeah.
And that's the kind of thing you are looking for in the painting?
Yes. But you're doing it through colour?
Yes. Through a rather pure colour.
When I first started painting abstract paintings
I usually use very sombre colours.
I had the idea that an important painting
had to be dark, earth colours.
The horrible thing is washing all these brushes. I bet.
The visual impressiveness of abstract art from the 1950s
and 1910s is carried on by abstract art now,
but often not with the old sense of abstract purity.
Here's an abstract art that's full of glinting
reflections by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui.
Unlike artists who work on a flat canvas and create patterns,
the visual complexity of which must be structured into the object,
El Anatsui allows his work to behave like textiles and the shadow
and light created by the drapery creates an additional
focus for what you're looking at and is part of the thought
process involved in the making.
It's a lesson in setting up meaning.
Meaning of a simpler less philosophical kind that the
early abstract artists went in for - he offers a jigsaw of meanings
that are abstract but easily readable.
Its structure imitates a traditional Ghanaian fabric called Kente
cloth, woven for centuries by labour intensive processes so the
visual effect is very rich. Kente cloth is a source of national pride.
If history is in the picture then the history of colonialism
must be in there too with all its human wretchedness.
And the materials El Anatsui uses suggest waste and squalor.
A work of abstract art made of bottleneck wrappers.
The bits of metal foil that go round the neck of a whiskey bottle
or a gin bottle.
Rubbish, really, scavenged from the street.
He makes it look like gold but it's old bits of foil.
It's rubbish that reads as gold.
There's an ambiguity or double meaning.
Baseness that can be transformed into gold, with gold
as the good thing, but also baseness might be indistinguishable
from or interchangeable with gold.
So gold's shimmer, its attractiveness, is untrustworthy.
It always depends where you stand in relation to it as to
whether or not gold DOES shimmer.
So maybe the impression of gold here is a metaphor for delusion?
The pioneer abstract artists 100 years ago thought
abstract values were the path to truth.
They took out any meanings to do with history, society, nationhood.
Those are the meanings El Anatsui built in.
He presents you with a powerful visual blast,
accompanied by questions about what power might mean.
Today all art competes in market
and purely abstract art is relatively rare.
Abstract art that has clues about easily gettable meaning
is preferred.
29 million, 30 million, 31 million.
Abstract art of the past gets huge prices today.
77 million and selling.
That much for a Rothko.
Not because he's subtle about red and black,
but because his high status name is synonymous with fabulous success.
Money is never really the point.
Rothko's predecessor, Hilma Af Klint, said,
"W is material, U is spiritual."
She really did believe what she was doing could alter the world.
If there's a rule of early abstract art as a whole it is that it
was incredibly optimistic.
So the rule of optimism passing on is the rule I'm now going to
sign off with, with a work by an artist who was born the same
year that Hilma Af Klint went up to the spirits in the sky.
Here's a kind of abstract art that's unequivocally visually amazing
but opened ended as to whom that amazement is for
and where it's coming from.
It's partly sinister because it's about wealth and we live in a
time where wealth is sinister and it's partly optimistic because
wealth is referred to by rubbish, old bits of thrown away metal foil.
So wealth's mystic is removed, its intimation is removed,
we can see through it.
But we're still getting the pleasure
and with that pleasure, a sense of a different kind of wealth,
the wealth of ideas as art processes contradictions.